Aircraft and spacecraft are designed utilizing a large number of electronic components from a variety of vendors. Most of these electronic components are designed using as many off the shelf parts as possible to keep manufacturing costs down. Input/output pin connectors used with electronic components are typical examples. A great deal of attention is paid to the size and the combined mass of the cables needed to connect to these pin connectors to the aircraft/spacecraft command and control systems.
For example, a standard 128 pin connector requires a cable with 128 wires or more with wire redundancy and shields. However, many of these wires may not be used because not all of the 128 pins may carry a signal or a source of voltage. As such, the weight of these unused wires is dead weight.
Weight and volume are limiting factors in aircraft and spacecraft design. Accordingly, it is desirable to eliminate any useless or redundant cable weight where lower signal count is possible. In addition, it is desirable to provide a modular cable interface device that is inexpensive and cheaply modified to connect any two devices with disparate pin geometries (e.g. a 128 pin connector to a 58 pin connector). Other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.